Dusseldorf There has never been such a failure in the history of the Internet. Facebook’s apps and websites did not work properly for six hours on Monday. Now Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg apologizes in an entry on the platform.
The incident raises many questions for the company and its nearly three billion daily users. Here are the most important answers:
From 5.45 p.m. German time, various Facebook applications could no longer be reached. The group blames a misconfiguration. Behind this are incorrectly coded software programs that blocked the connection to Facebook’s data centers.
IT experts all over the world were able to watch the so-called “Border Gateway Protocol” (BGP) from Facebook disappear yesterday. BGP is something of a beacon in the ocean of the Internet, telling other networks where to find the company’s servers.
Contact with the outside world was cut off when the “Domain Name System” (DNS) of Facebook could no longer be found. That created a cascade of other problems. The DNS servers were no longer controllable, which led to a self-reinforcing effect: The users were often so amazed by the technical failure that, according to the software company Cloudflare, they tried “sometimes very aggressively” to access Facebook again and again. Many deleted their apps in order to reload them. The effect: The inquiries increased by 30 times, which in turn caused problems for the servers of other Internet providers.
It is not known who programmed the error on Facebook. However, incorrect configurations on the Internet are generally not uncommon. The Trend Micro security platform finds an average of 230 million incorrect configurations per day. They not only burden the smooth running of the IT systems, but are also a major security risk. According to the market research institute ESG, 27 percent of all cybersecurity attacks can be traced back to incorrect configurations.
Which services were affected?
The first error messages occurred on the Facebook social network, after which the Instagram photo app and the WhatsApp messenger service also failed. According to the American IT company Downdetector, the failure was the largest in history. A total of 14 million users worldwide complained about problems.
What is less well known: Workplace, Facebook’s offer for internal corporate communication – which competes with providers like Slack, was also affected. It became known a few days ago through the whistleblower Frances Haugen, who shortly before she left Facebook, fetched various sensitive files from Workplace and published them.
The failure of internal communication on Facebook made solving the problem considerably more difficult. According to US media reports, employees used zoom, e-mail or other communication platforms. At 11:45 p.m., access to Facebook was restored, while WhatsApp took longer.
What are the consequences of the incident for Facebook and the share?
Facebook’s share price fell sharply on Tuesday – the group lost a total of around $ 40 billion in market capitalization. However, this was primarily due to the weak market environment, with tech stocks falling sharply overall.
The Internet failure of Facebook itself, on the other hand, was only weakly visible on the price chart. The stock fell just a few dollars after the disruption was announced. The paper made up for the loss at the end of trading.
The restrained reaction of investors can be explained by the limited economic damage to Facebook. The network effect of its services is very strong – hardly anyone will log out of Instagram, for example, due to the disruption.
However, the intelligence services Signal and Telegram reported significantly more inquiries. In the US, Signal shot up 55 places to number one for iPhone downloads. But if friends or acquaintances don’t follow suit, many users will probably not say goodbye to WhatsApp completely. Perhaps that would be different if there were regular failures. But users dismiss the incident as a one-time thing.
How great is the damage to the users?
The failure also has economic consequences for countless companies and self-employed who use Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to attract customers, sell products and communicate with their customers. According to Telefónica (O2), the number of SMS sent was three times as high as usual on Monday evening.
Many gamers were also affected by the failure: prominent computer gamers film themselves playing their games; Because Facebook plays advertisements to its thousands of fans, the players can partly finance their livelihood with it.
The business model of many Instagram influencers works in a similar way. Some of them were able to temporarily switch to other platforms, but many complained online that they did not reach all of their fans and customers.
A clue: Influencers with 1,000 to 5,000 followers make an average of $ 10 to $ 60 per post. According to the cybersecurity organization Netblocks, the failure of the global economy cost a total of 160 million dollars an hour.
In the American media, however, many of the Internet self-employed were calm. “I would see it like a natural disaster on social media,” said Elizabeth Gore, for example, the Wall Street Journal. She is the founder of Hello Alice, which advises companies and the self-employed.
Have there been similar incidents?
In spring 2019 there had already been a major failure on Facebook. All services could not be used for an hour, and the company also blamed a misconfiguration back then.
The largest Facebook outage to date occurred in 2008, when a virus paralyzed the system for a day. However, only 80 million users worldwide were affected – because Facebook was only four years old and the big growth spurt was still to come.
But it’s not just Facebook that has such difficulties. The largest Internet sites in the world did not work in June 2021 when the American cloud computing service Fastly went down. The websites of Amazon, Reddit or the English government were not accessible for hours.
The internet failure in 2016 was something special. This was not due to a technical error, but rather to the largest known cyber attack in history. The American DNS provider Dyn was inundated with so many requests by hackers that numerous Internet sites and platforms such as Twitter, Netflix or CNN went offline for hours.
More: Facebook names configuration errors as the cause of failure